Food and waterborne pathogens cause a considerable amount of disease all over the world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that around 76 million cases of foodborne diseases occur in the USA, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5000 deaths occur each year. Billions of dollars are lost due to bacterial contamination in foods and a similar amount of money is spent for related health care costs. Some foodborne diseases are well recognized, but are considered emerging because they have recently become more common. Among the various pathogens that can cause food borne illness, Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, and Escherichia coli O157:H7 have been generally found to be responsible for majority of food-borne outbreaks.
Conventional food screening for detecting bio-threat risks and the toxins in the food supply can involve many steps, high labor and reagent costs, and be time consuming (e.g., minimum 2-3 days to obtain reliable information). Current biosensors can also suffer from user non-compliance because of the heavy weight of the sensor modules, and inflexibility of the sensor platforms for routine uses.